Friends

The modern sailboat a 40-foot performance cruiser looked like a splinter of white bone against the dark, churning water of the Ramsey harbor. Unlike the Vanguard, which displaced the sea with the sheer arrogance of nuclear power, this vessel danced on the surface. Its carbon-fiber mast swayed in a slow, rhythmic arc, reaching toward the jaundiced sky like a skeletal finger.

​Fallon and Elena watched from the stone quay as Holt and his men prepared to disembark. The boat's scoop transom the tiered swimming platform at the stern was level with the floating dock, but the men chose to use the narrow, lightweight gangplank extending from the midships rail.

​The descent was a study in fragile geometry. As Holt stepped onto the plank, the boat heeled slightly toward the dock, its GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic) hull groaning against the rubber fenders. The sound was thin and sharp, a stark contrast to the deep, resonant thrum of the submarine anchored further out.

​"There's less men than last time, Elira," Elena said, her voice sounding small against the rhythmic slap of the waves.

She watched the sailors move with a cautious, unhurried gait, their boots clicking against the textured surface of the gangplank.

​"A lot of them wanted to go home, and I don't blame them," Fallon responded, her eyes tracking Holt as he stepped off the wood and onto the solid, unforgiving concrete of the Ramsey dock.

​She watched her First Officer pause to adjust the strap of his rifle. Behind him, only three others followed. The vast, open deck of the sailboat, designed for a full crew and the luxury of the old world, now looked cavernous and empty a high-tech ghost ship draped in the sulfurous dust of a dying atmosphere.

Holt's face was a mask of grey fatigue as he reached the top of the stone steps. He didn't offer a salute; that formality had vanished somewhere between the first empty aisle and the third supermarket. He simply stood there, his boots still wet with the brine of the harbor, his silhouette framed by the high, carbon-fiber mast of the sailboat behind him.

"Report, Commander," Fallon ordered.

Her voice was the only thing in Ramsey that still sounded like a machine cold, precise, and refusing to buckle under the jaundiced weight of the morning.

Holt took a shallow, ragged breath. "Six supermarkets, ma'am. We hit the entire northern sprawl."

He looked past her, his gaze fixating on the empty horizon of the Irish Sea as if the data were written on the clouds.

"Three were picked clean nothing but empty shelving and broken glass. Two had a decent cache; we managed to haul out enough tins and dry goods to keep the galley running for another three weeks if we ration."

He stopped. The rhythmic slap of the water against the sailboat's hull seemed to grow louder, filling the sudden, jagged hole in his sentence.

"And the third?" Fallon pressed, her eyes narrowing.

"The third..." Holt's jaw tightened, a rhythmic twitch pulsing in his cheek.

"We lost four sailors, ma'am. It wasn't the locals. It was those... those inky bastards. They'd turned the loading bay into a larder. We walked right into the middle of it."

Elena let out a soft, stifled gasp, her hand flying to her mouth. Fallon didn't flinch, but the line of her shoulders turned to granite. Four men. In a world where their headcount was already a tragedy, four men was a catastrophe.

"Did you neutralize the threat?" Fallon asked, her voice dropping into that low, dangerous register.

"We burned it," Holt said, his eyes finally meeting hers dark and hollowed out.

"But they don't die like us, Elira. They just... boil. We left them behind in the smoke, but I wouldn't call it a victory."

Fallon looked past Holt, her gaze fixing on the white splinter of the sailboat. The carbon-fiber mast swayed in a slow, rhythmic arc a high-tech pendulum counting down the end of their strength.

"Twenty-five now," she said, her voice barely a splinter in the wind.

"Sorry, ma'am?" Holt prodded, squinting against the jaundiced light.

"Twenty-five sailors gone, Chris. All within the last two months." Fallon turned her head, her eyes sharp and cold as flint.

"As of now, no more runs to the mainland. We aren't trading lives for tinned peaches anymore. Understood?"

"Understood, ma'am," Holt replied, his posture stiffening despite his exhaustion.

"What's the count on the supplies? Did you get what Brack wanted?"

Greg Brack had become the town's unlikely lifeline. A local farmer with dirt permanently etched into the creases of his palms, he'd turned Ramsey into a patchwork quilt of survival. He had reclaimed every available inch of earth, from the decorative planters on Parliament Street to the stone sills of the St Paul's Church, where rows of potato greens now reached for the sickly amber sun.

"We got the haul," Holt said, gesturing back to the deck of the sailboat where crates were being winched upward.

"Six flat-pack greenhouses, as many packs of seeds as we could scavenge everything from kale to winter cabbage and one very interesting-looking turnip."

"A turnip?" Elena looked puzzled, a small, incredulous frown touching her face.

"You lost four men and risked a boat for a root vegetable?"

Holt gave a weary, lopsided shrug. "It was on the shopping list, Elena. Brack was specific. Said if we found heirlooms, we were to bring them back alive."

"It's not just a vegetable, Elena," Fallon added, her eyes tracking the movement of the crates.

"In Brack's hands, it's a blueprint. It's the difference between us eating this month and us eating next year."

She looked at the sailboat, its hull reflecting the bruised sky. It was a fragile, beautiful machine, never designed to be a pack mule for a starving colony, but it was all they had left that could move quietly through the shallows.

"Get the greenhouses to the church grounds," Fallon commanded.

"And tell Brack he better make that turnip count."

"Oh, Chris."

Fallon's voice caught him just as he turned to rally the remaining hands for the heavy lifting. The wind off the bay tugged at his jacket, making the fabric snap like a distant flag.

"Yes, Commander?" Holt paused, his frame silhouetted against the white, rhythmic swaying of the sailboat's mast.

"Did the others get off okay?"

"Yes," Chris replied, his gaze drifting momentarily toward the horizon they'd just left behind.

"After supermarket two, they left. They took their kits and headed west into the treeline. No trouble, no fuss."

"Good. Carry on, Chris."

Elena watched him go, the sound of his boots crunching rhythmically on the grit of the quay until he was out of earshot. She leaned back against the cold stone of the harbor wall, her brow furrowed.

"What was that, Elira?" she asked, her voice hushed.

"Ten sailors wanted to go home, so I allowed it," Fallon said.

She watched the crew on the sailboat's deck, their movements slow and heavy with the fatigue of the new world.

"But isn't that against the rules or summit?" Elena asked, her eyes wide.

"Desertion? I mean, I've seen the movies. They usually shoot people for that, don't they?"

A small, weary smile touched the corners of Elira's mouth a rare, human flicker behind the Commander's mask.

"Only if the big-wigs at Command find out and since Command is currently a thirty-mile crater of yellow fire, I think I'm safe from a court-martial."

Elena let out a short, breathy laugh, her shoulders relaxing for the first time that morning. She looked at Fallon with a newfound, playful glint in her eyes.

"Oh, you're a bad girl, Elira Fallon," she teased, her voice dropping into a warm, rhythmic lilt.

"Did I ever tell you I like bad girls?"

The jaundiced light of the sky seemed to soften for a moment, the tension of the lost sailors and the inky horrors of the mainland retreating behind a brief, shared spark of levity. Fallon didn't answer, but she didn't look away either, the silence between them filled only by the distant cry of a gull and the low, subsonic thrum of the leviathan waiting out in the deep.